Moliere wrote:I was so determined not to employ a wide angle lens that on my publicity and website shots I only used a 50 mm (ie standard view). I didn't want to exaggerate or distort anything.
I have to say, it was a real struggle, but at least I could rest easy that our guests had the benefit of "wysiwyg"!
JUDGE: Mr Defence Counsel, your client is charged with the serious crime of deliberately using wide angle lenses to deceive the public and thereby to gain pecuniary advantage in so doing. How do you plead?
DEFENCE COUNSEL: M’lud, my client has been a professional photographer for 35 years and regards photographic lenses as the tools of his trade to present his clients’ properties to their best advantage. He finds it odd that the same gite owners who criticise the use of wide angle lenses to enhance a property’s attraction, go to great lengths to shoot pictures of their property in optimum conditions – by choosing a viewpoint that avoids showing unsightly power lines, in brilliant sunshine (when that’s not always going to be present) or with flowers in full bloom (that may be over when guests arrive) and so on. However, my client is generous and doesn’t regard such ‘enhancement’ as evil trickery by wicked gite owners because he knows that viewing audiences are visually sophisticated people who fully understand that the role of advertising is to present a polished image of a product (indeed, he believes that we imbibe such knowledge with our mother’s milk). Just as they can look at the picture below, shot on a 14mm extreme wide angle lens, which shows the ground floor area of a gite, and know that the chairs in the foreground weren’t designed for Nellie the Elephant or the roses in the vase aren’t the size of a Brazilian rainforest.
M’lud, my client has every confidence that the jury will clear him of this misguided accusation.
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